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Talk:Mary Anna Custis Lee
You know, now that I've just deleted the Lees category, I'm remembering that GotS has so many Lee relatives in it that if we were to give them all articles we may well end up putting the category right back. Turtle Fan 18:57, November 23, 2009 (UTC) :A distinct possibility. :Incidentally, as I was mousing around on the issue of Lees at some point, I came to wonder why we are so wedded to Fitzhugh specficially as "President Lee". REL had four sons, after all, and at least one, William, also went into politics in his life. :I also continued to wonder why HT dropped an abrupt reference to President Lee in at that point. If it was REL, why no other references. If not REL, well, why drop in that stupid reference. TR 19:06, November 23, 2009 (UTC) ::I went through the exact same process as I was removing the Lees. Fitz was the most successful of the Lee politicians, but that hardly guarantees him for the role. Since HT seems to think Lee could be persuaded to accept the Presidency after all (GotS) then it may well have been President REL. But yes, that should have been mentioned elsewhere--God knows REL was referred to often enough. And if not, agreed, why the stupid reference. The only thing I can think of is that Turtledove wanted to give Featherston three names for his laundry list; using not two, not four, but three examples has been a rhetorical norm since time out of mind. Another example of three as a magic number. ::Shall we remove Fitz and put in a nice generic "President Lee" article? Turtle Fan 19:34, November 23, 2009 (UTC) :::No, I think it can stay. It was created in the reign of Silver. Since Silver never said anything about it, and since Silver is in touch with HT, I think we should take Silver's silence on the matter as tacit approval based on knowledge acquried from HT. TR 19:37, November 23, 2009 (UTC) ::::I suppose, but he let stand a lot of stuff which we've since decanonized on grounds of being excessively speculative. Turtle Fan 20:41, November 23, 2009 (UTC) :::Hmm. True. Let's decanonize then. We can put a literary comment in the REL page, or create an article a la Theodore Roosevelt's Vice President (Southern Victory). Truthfully, we should probably do away with Horatio Seymour as 191 president as well. TR 21:19, November 23, 2009 (UTC) ::I was thinking of your VP for this one. As for Seymour, he was put up by Silver. That's given me pause in removing him more than once. Turtle Fan 21:55, November 23, 2009 (UTC) :Ah yes, there was a reason we tolerated that bit of weirdness. Never mind then. TR 22:11, November 23, 2009 (UTC) Which Mary? While doing up the article on nitroglycerin, I checked wikipedia to see if there was an easy way to distinguish the daughter from the mother. It indicated that Lee's wife was named "Mary Anna Randolph Custis" and the daughter was "Mary Custis Lee". I believe this article should be renamed to "Mary Anna Lee" and "Mary Custis Lee" used as the article for the daughter. ML4E 17:31, November 5, 2011 (UTC) :Like Lincoln's wife, she's commonly referred to by a name she never used. Neither did she ever use Mary Anna Lee, however. If it means anything, her Wikipedia article is titled Mary Anna Custis Lee. I guess they could be referred to as Mary Anna Custis Lee and Mary Custis Lee, somewhat like George HW Bush and George W Bush. :Now that you've opened this can of worms I'm realizing that there's no way to distinguish between the two women in the titles of the articles, not really. What we might want to do is make this article a disambiguation page, much like Yossel Reisen. For some stupid reason women apparently can't use Sr and Jr in their names, so we'd have to title the articles "Mary (Anna?) Custis Lee (mother)" and "Mary Custis Lee (daughter)." ::This seems like the best course of action; at the very minimum Mary-the-daughter's article should have "daughter" in parenthesis. The daughter was actually called "Daughter" by the family (indeed all of the kids had weird nicknames, a minor fact HT did work in that I'd completely forgotten), so having it in the title of the article makes sense. TR 17:01, November 6, 2011 (UTC) :::I agree. I was going to withdraw my previous suggestion after I had reread the early part of GotS when Lee first got home. Turtledove refers several times to the mother as "Mary Custis Lee" and the daughter as "daughter Mary". TF's suggestion above along with a disambiguation page works for me. ML4E 19:29, November 6, 2011 (UTC) ::::Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Turtle Fan 00:35, November 7, 2011 (UTC) ::ADDENDUM: we should probably just go ahead and revive a "Lee family" article--I think HT worked everyone into GotS. TR 17:03, November 6, 2011 (UTC) :::That's my recollection too. The two childeren with the biggest articles would be Mary Jr. and George Washington Custis Lee but the others get at least a mention or two. ML4E 19:29, November 6, 2011 (UTC) ::::There were eight kids, weren't there? Robert and Mary make ten, Fitz makes eleven, and then a possible twelfth if I correctly remember a scene where Lee is asked a question about the blockade and says the person asking would be better off asking his brother (presumably Sydney). I know I've read such a scene in some ACW novel or other, I somehow feel that it was GotS. If I'm right it would still be pretty thin stuff to hang an article on. ::::Even twelve is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Lee family. I really wish HT would do more WfI stories. Turtle Fan 00:35, November 7, 2011 (UTC) :By the way, when I opened her Wiki article I noticed that she had once turned down a marriage proposal by Sam Houston. A shame HT didn't drop that little tidbit into LatA. I would have . . . learned a mildly interesting and thoroughly unimportant piece of trivia a couple months earlier than I did. No, not so great a shame, I guess. Turtle Fan 21:54, November 5, 2011 (UTC)